How Reddit’s Sales Team Is Making The Ad Industry “More Human”

“We are making connections between these established entities and the communities that could be mutually beneficial to each other.”

Representing our Los Angeles-based sales team, Will Cady (aka u/itswac on Reddit) recently sat down with The Daily Dot to share some of the guiding principles behind Reddit’s advertising philosophy, explaining how advertising and brand strategy have evolved at Reddit over the past few years.

The Daily Dot caught up with Cady in the middle of a four-day AMA IRL series at SXSW, broadcast and co-hosted by our friends at Twitch. The event, sponsored by the Sony Pictures film Life, featured live performances, gaming, interviews, and AMAs across a range of Reddit communities.

The Mayor of Austin joined Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian in kicking off the first day of the stream before diving into an AMA in r/politics. Over the next 96 hours, the lineup (both on-stage and on the platform) included Rogue One director Gareth Edwards, Entourage star Adrian Grenier, hip-hop legends Just Blaze and Grandmaster Flash, DJ San Holo, the hosts of Pod Save America, and NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest winner Gaelynn Lea.

“The foundation of our concept,” Cady explains, “married Reddit’s Ask Me Anything crowd-sourced interview format with Twitch’s chat-enabled live streaming broadcasting from a main stage—around which we built a 4-day event highlighting the passions of a variety of Reddit’s wide swath of communities from r/VirtualReality to r/Yoga to r/HipHopHeads to r/SciFi.”

“Reddit has been experimenting with impact. This was a proof of concept for the immense power of what is possible when ‘Reddit shows up’ in the real world,” Cady says.

“As Reddit has evolved over the past decade, it’s become the home for some of the best self-expression on the Internet. Cathartic testimonials, epic paintings, crowd-sourced film projects. The very beginning of our ads framework about half a decade ago, the Promoted Post, enabled some of the best self-promotion on the web—whether turning bedroom albums into record deals or launching kitchen table start-ups.

“One of our core values at Reddit is to ‘remember the human’ and another is to ‘evolve.’ That frames the approach we’re taking to the ads industry. We want to see how much we can challenge advertisers out there to, well… evolve and be more human.”

If you’re interested in working for the front page of the internet and have experience in sales, brand strategy, or ad ops, we’re hiring! Check out our list of open positions here.